Your column yesterday, "Did the Israelis Do It?," was on the mark.
Whenever there are charges of massacres and atrocities by one people against
another, I look around for a public-relations man. Sure, there are cases when
warring armies go berserk and engage in wholesale slaughter. The Armenians
still hold a blood grudge against the Turks for the deaths of 600,000 who died
in 1915 when Turkey decided the entire Armenian population of 1,750,000 had to
be deported for national security reasons in World War I. But for the most
part, mass killings generally turn out to be inflated, or even non-events.
Propaganda is a useful tool in the hands of a weak people to win sympathy
against those who dominate. This seems to be what happened at Jenin, as the
reports of Israeli soldiers indiscriminately killing Palestinians in a blood
lust turn out to be greatly exaggerated. It would have been good if the UN had
been permitted to do its own investigation, but there have been enough reports
from the area by other authorities to indicate barbaric acts were not the
rule.

I remember when I was a little boy growing up in Brooklyn during World War II,
hearing stories of how "the Japs" would throw babies in the air and
catch them on their bayonets. Of course I believed them at the time, as they
were meant to persuade us that they were subhuman. When we heard that
Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands of civilians with atomic
bombs, it was easier for us to understand why it had to be done. The Japs were
fanatical They even resorted to kamikaze pilots, young men who
would volunteer to crash their planes into US warships, and certain death. Of
course, after the war, when Japan and Germany aligned with us in the Cold War,
Hollywood depicted kinder and gentler military men among the axis powers, even
in the wartime settings. I watched Hogan's Heroes the other night on
TVLand and marveled at how quickly the "krauts" had become downright
cuddly.

Over the years, I've seen it again and again, as good guys suddenly have to
become bad guys and vice versa. The Bosnians several years ago stole the PR
march on the Serbs with a campaign about Serb atrocities. When the stories of
the Bosnian atrocities came out much later, they were buried in the back pages
of the newspapers. Slobodan Milosevic had been the good guy as far as we were
concerned, a multiculturalist ally running a stable Yugoslavia. But when the
economy cratered under the evil influence of the IMF, and the big guys in DC
decided it would be good to give NATO something to do, he became a bad guy,
and is now in the docket at the Hague for war crimes, massacres and
atrocities.

So too with Iraq. As long as the Iraqi Army was killing Iranians in their
eight-year war, he was a good guy, and our government helped him as much as it
could to do the killing. The Israelis, on the other hand, back Iran, as our
government and Israel's decided it would be in both our interests if they bled
each other white. When the war ended in 1988, with Iraq winning a surprise
victory over a nation three times its size, it suddenly became convenient for
our government to charge Saddam Hussein with "gassing his own
people" at Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan in March and of wiping out 100,000
Kurds with poison gas in August of '88. As you note in your column, when
journalists went out to corroborate the deaths of 200 Arabs at the hands of
murderous Israelis in the aftermath of the 1967 war, the victims could not be
found. That's 200. To this day, there is still no sign of the whereabouts of
the 100,000 Iraqi citizens who supposedly were slaughtered by Saddam's troops.
Stephen Pelletiere, who led a team of the Army War College who investigated
the charges, told me recently that this never happened, that it was a
"hoax," or non-event. But because it is repeated incessantly by the
administration, there is probably not more than one or two members of Congress
who have not swallowed it.

The "babies on a bayonet" was actually a hoax drummed up by a PR
firm hired by the Israeli Lobby in 1990, to stoke up passions against Iraq.
When the Iraqi Army invaded Kuwait, there was plenty of wariness about getting
involved in a border dispute, but then stories appeared about how the Iraqis
pulled the plugs on 300 infants in their hospital incubators. One step away
from bayonets. The story got plenty of attention, but when congressional
investigators looked at that doozy, they found it had been concocted by the
same PR firm in Washington that is now running the Office of Strategic
Influence, on the sly, in the Pentagon.

Did you happen to notice, Bill, this little item in Investor's Business
Daily last week? Remember the story spread far and wide that 9-11 suicide
bomber, Mohammed Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in
2001? Now IBD tells us: "US investigators no longer believe
suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Europe
in 2001, eliminating the only known link between Iraq and the Sept 11
attack." The Czech government found that Mohammed Atta had not been in
Prague when they said he was. Whoops! But if you ask President Bush or any
member of the U.S. Congress, I'm sure not many read that little item. Babies
on bayonets go a long way.